It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Here’s a plotline we’re all familiar with, something from a novel or a movie. After years of good health, our heroine begins to feel less like herself. She feels sluggish and fatigued at work. She loses her appetite and can’t sleep at night. She begins to worry. 

So she makes an appointment with her doctor and the recommended specialists, of which there are many. Yet, the medical diagnosis is the same: there&...

When you think back on your most memorable meal, what comes to mind? The company you kept? The exceptional wine list? An entre made up of the freshest Louisiana ingredients?

Chef Barrett Meeks and Abney Harper are two Baton Rouge restaurateurs making memorable meals for locals with successful establishments located just doors apart from each other on Corporate Boulevard in Baton Rouge.

Executive Chef Barret Meeks of Mansurs On The ...

We all know raising kids takes a village—but what if you’re the one building that village? What if you're the one creating the spaces where children feel safe?

Daycare

Tessa Holloway is the Owner and Director of Kidz Karousel, a network of early learning centers with nine locations across South Louisiana. What started as a personal decision to save her children’s daycare in Port Allen has grown into one of the reg...

Only a particularly hard-hearted human could see a dog or cat in trouble and not want to help. Maybe you’d share a post on social media. Or make a donation to a shelter, or a Go-Fund Me for a pet. But would you contemplate turning your back on your current career and dedicating your professional life to saving the lives of thousands of pets?

That’s what J.T Hackett did. (J.T’s real name is Jacelyn, but everybody c...

Asking for help isn’t always easy, but sometimes, it’s the smartest thing you can do, especially when it comes to learning. Amanda Martin learned that firsthand as a parent. When her kids hit middle school, she started looking for academic support — something beyond worksheets and flashcards. 

She found that the tutoring landscape felt outdated and uninspired. So Amanda decided to build the kind of place she ...

Food is culture. It’s memory and identity. But turning tradition into innovation takes more than a good recipe. It takes creativity, grit, and a deep understanding of what people crave.

Yvette Bonanno knows that well. She grew up in the Baton Rouge restaurant scene and that early exposure sparked a lifelong love for food. Today, she’s combining that experience with cutting-edge food production as the founder of Crave-a-...

Entrepreneurship can start in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it starts with a tiny idea that just grows alongside a community. Other times, it comes from a personal need—something you realize just isn’t out there yet, and you decide to build it yourself.

That’s exactly what happened with Abbey Lovett. She’s a mom of two who saw something missing in the Baton Rouge business scene: a flexible, supportive w...

Baton Rouge is a city known for its strong sense of community. But it’s also a city that’s becoming more aware of the need to protect and enhance its natural environment. 

In a region where development has often meant the loss of green spaces, there’s a growing movement to restore and care for what’s left—especially its trees.

Sage Roberts Foley is Executive Director of Baton Rouge Green, an organ...

We love to divide things into categories of two.  Tall or short. Hot or cold. Liberal or conservative. And then there’s creative, or not. 

That one’s simply not true. Everyone has something they want to see come to life. Everyone has a vision of something they’d love to create that doesn’t exist… yet.

18 years ago, Chris Dykes started tracking his habits on an Excel spreadsheet. In the cours...

Animals. For most people animals are a part of their everyday life. Maybe it's your dog that loves it so much when you come home from work. Maybe there's a duck in the park you go to that remembers you because you feed him every time you see him. 

Regardless of where you run into them or what your relationship is with them, animals affect all of us. But some deal with animals you don’t see every day. 

One of those p...

When you draw up a business contract, lawyers try and predict the myriad things that could go wrong and plan strategies and remedies so if they do there are no surprises and you know what to do.

Well, outside of business, real life is different. You can’t even imagine the number of things that can go – well, if not totally wrong, not as right as you’d like.

When things go off the rails, or before they do, to try a...

"Hi, how are you? " 

It's amazing how often the word "hi" and the question “How are you?” go together. The latter is such a standard greeting it barely registers as a serious question.

The standard answer is, “Good. How are you?” Now, if we were to stop there and have a real conversation about how we are, most of us would say we’re good, but we could be better. We’d like a better job, b...

In the past few decades, technology has taken over the way we live our lives. From the books that we read to news we receive, the way we consume media has been changed forever. But recently, there’s been a movement to return to the analogue. Whether it’s vinyl records, DVDs, or even newspapers - the demand for physical media is growing.

Creators and storytellers across the nation are meeting that growing need by making ...

Baton Rouge has long been a city of tradition. People here can be a little resistant to change. This is true from centers of political, economic and even medical focus. But recently, the stage has been set for the capital city to become a place of innovation. 

We never know where life might take us. Something small that happens to us, or that we witness as children, may change the course of our lives. Andy Barth grew up i...

The golden rule of real estate has always been, "Location Location Location." Today in Louisiana it's more like, "Location, Insurance, Mortgage."

When we say "real estate" we're mostly talking about something more than just a transaction. "A man’s house is his castle," as the old saying goes, or maybe we should say a person’s house is their castle. But whatever, the adage speaks to something really meaningful about the ...

In some ways, there are two Louisianas.

There's the one the tourism marketing folks sell to visitors, centered on New Orleans on one side of Baton Rouge and Cajun Country on the other. And then there's the Louisiana that we live in, which is Baton Rouge. Maybe to tourist salespeople it looks like there's nothing very exciting going on here, but that is far from the truth. Baton Rouge is anything but a civil-service seat of governme...

When you’re launching your own business, some of the first questions you have to ask yourself are, who is your target market? How are you going to differentiate yourself from the competition? Are you going to try to be all things to all people? Or go niche? Will you specialize in a certain area, or combine some of your talents and skills to appeal to a particular customer base? Getting these foundational questions wrong can b...

We live in fractured, divided times where sometimes even simple facts about basic reality are too much for folks to agree on. Partisan politics, social media and the internet serve to divide us and keep us apart. And experts tell us all the time that even though we’re more digitially connected than ever, we’re paradoxically more isolated and lonely.

How do we address this complex challenge? On this edition of Out to Lunch, Stephani...

"All the world's a stage," as Shakespeare famously wrote, and we are "merely players" performing roles, today as professionals or politicians or teachers in a classroom of students. or parents modeling behavior for their children. 

In an era when traditional media, social media, and ever-present modes of telecommunications determine how these roles and personas are received and perceived, crafting images, honing messages, and telli...